4

The Inter-National Novel

Until 1848, there was little sense of what a contemporary ‘English literature’ might look like. Shakespeare in England, like Racine in France, was acknowledged as an historical ‘national’ poet, but contemporary writing was not necessarily expected to be national, as we saw in Chapter 3.¹ Translations, adaptations, plagiarisms, stage versions: the raw stuff of ‘literature’ was freely circulating around Europe, and uncertain copyright regimes and the technological developments that were exponentially upscaling print production and distribution meant that fiction was not necessarily home-produced, and nobody expected it to be.² Better educated middle-and upper-class readers in Britain would generally be able to read in French, even if they were not so proficient at speaking it (as we saw in Chapter 1).³ Often they could read in Italian and German too, and fiction, in particular, was understood to be a cross-European phenomenon.⁴ Lewis Namier’s argument that ‘the common denominator [of 1848] was ideological, and even literary, and that there was a basic unity and cohesion in the intellectual world of the European continent’ oversimplifies and overstates, but there was doubtless a movement towards identifying a commonality of cause.⁵ Serial fiction, including both that printed in the popular rags discussed in Chapter 3 and the more serious ‘literary’ novels coming out in parts, certainly acted as one of the catalysts of the 1848 revolutions.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, an inveterate reader of popular serials in several languages, saw clearly the political direction that the fiction of the mid-1840s was taking: ‘Balzac’s “Paysans” in its one volume, (for I have seen only that one volume) is another proof of the pressure of the times towards sympathies with the people. And a new work by George Sand “Le meunier d’Angibault” goes the same way.’⁶ Gaining energy and power through the European revolutions of 1848 as ‘the pressure of the times’ continued to move writers towards ‘sympathies with the people’, a new social realism was to assert itself as a serial international phenomenon in the 1850s and 1860s. Roland Barthes diagnoses the ‘Flaubertization’ of literature after the revolutions because ‘[t]he bloody civil conflict of June 1848 signalled the indisputable social dominance of the bourgeoisie, and with it the collapse of the illusions of liberalism’.⁷ Pierre Bourdieu agrees that

the failure of the [revolutionary] movement and the installation of the Second Empire: the collapse of illusions which I will expressly call ‘forty-eighter’…leads to that extraordinary disenchantment…which provides a favourable terrain for a new assertion of intellectuals’ autonomy, this time radically elitist. The defenders of art for art’s sake…assert the autonomy of the artist.⁸

It is true that in Second Empire France, renewed censorship would necessitate careful circumventions of explicit social and political themes, but it is a mistake to think that ‘art for art’s sake’ has no politics or that it represents an elite retreat from the social. If this were the case, it would be difficult to explain why Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert were both taken to court in France in 1857 for publishing Les Fleurs du Mal and Madame Bovary respectively. Paris was surely no centre of literary freedom between 1850 and 1870. Nevertheless, as is discussed in the ‘Afterword’ to this volume, Flaubert’s works continued to grapple with profoundly ‘realist’ themes. And Baudelaire had been at the barricades during February 1848 and again in June. Those experiences had only strengthened his belief that ‘[p]oetry could change the existing world, and produce worlds never before seen’.⁹ Jean-Paul Sartre admired Mallarmé’s and Flaubert’s attempts to ‘wage war on cliché and complacency, and create new varieties of social meaning’.¹⁰

A reading of 1848 that interprets the pan-European events only as defeats and then diagnoses the collapse of the illusions of liberalism as their main consequence misrecognizes the new social contract that is slowly shunting into place across much of the rest of Europe, and that in France will eventually lead to the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Third Republic. The very different horizons of possibility encountered by writers working under vastly different political, censorship, and social regimes in the nineteenth century mean that ‘realism’ can seem almost as porous and as useless a historical category as ‘modernity’. Except that, as Fredric Jameson has argued in The Antinomies of Realism, ‘realism’ retains its currency by testing the shifting and unstable balance between writer and community in the nineteenth century and beyond. As Jameson himself puts it, realism is always a ‘potential emergence or a potential breakdown’, and as such, I would add, it is particularly well adapted to serial forms of travel.¹¹ Jameson also says that ‘Kierkegaard’s discovery of anxiety, and Marx’s dramatization, by way of his theory of alienation, of “naked life” can also be summoned to document this radical transformation of the experience of the body in the European 1840s’.¹² As demonstrated in Chapter 3, the spectacle of the ragged and the attendant acknowledgement of the precarity introduced by the market into people’s lives had repositioned and repoliticized the experience of bodiliness in the 1840s.¹³

Nevertheless, in France immediately after the revolution of 1848, ‘realism’ was a term of abuse.¹⁴ It might be necessary to temporarily set the term aside in order to see the shared identity of much of the European and some of the non-European fiction of 1848 and after. Even the British nineteenth-century ‘realist’ novel emerges from precisely the national–international problematic of 1848 rooted in the social redistribution of citizenship. It is no accident that this problematic mirrors perfectly what are often identified as precisely the foundational concerns of realism: the value of the individual life as part of a wider collective and the relationship of local place to the world. Because of the early uptake of new printing technologies and, as discussed in Chapter 2, a collaborative and cooperative Anglo-French periodical press, the ‘realist’ novel in nineteenth-century Europe floated easily between London and Paris. But other ‘realisms’ sprang up elsewhere, in Russia, North America, and Latin America, for example, to join the series. Critics have struggled to connect the cross-European emergence of realism to the shared revolution, noting the ‘simultaneity of its upsurge in France, England, and the German-speaking regions…France and the German-speaking regions share a more or less unsuccessful revolution (1848)’. So muses Luc Herman, hopeful of tracing a causality, but the chain collapses because ‘of course that explanation would hardly apply to Britain’.¹⁵ Instead of a linear, causative seriality, the emergence of a literature we can identify as ‘realist’ operated as a Sartrean seriality: a series of responses to a similar pressure from very different places and political contexts.¹⁶ And in each of these cases, as we saw in the previous chapter, the pressure was the new visibility of suffering and poverty. The writing was called out in the same way as the revolutions themselves: as a local response to local conditions. But the local response gained energy and mobility by plugging itself into a larger series of similar phenomena.¹⁷

In her celebrated World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova applied world-systems theory to ‘world literature’: she argued that ‘[r]ival languages compete for dominance; revolutions are always at once literary and political’.¹⁸ It is odd, therefore, that she makes very little of 1848. She argues that its revolutionary history makes Paris seem artistically and politically identified with ‘freedom’, but Casanova’s paradigmatic model of the production of literature does not involve the messy business of newspaper printing or the complex politics of distribution and readership. Her ‘freedom’ is abstract, but freedom has to be imagined, then made on the streets, and then accepted.¹⁹ The ‘[f]aith in the universality of Paris’ that she claims makes it the ‘denationalized and universal capital of the literary world’ betrays an inherently colonial model of literary writing, in which every writer tries to gain admittance to the Parisian metropolitan pantheon by ‘rebelling’ and remaking language.²⁰ A different model suggested by the remarkable and linked events of 1848 might be one in which writers are mobilized instead by a sense of the seriality of the social, which is also a sense of the widening horizon of their imagined readerships. Such a serial model gives people the permission and confidence to write their own responses to the contradictions of their own conditions from their own location. These local texts are created as part of a serial, but like all serials, this one cannot be tethered to Paris or anywhere, but is rather always in motion. The seriality puts the part (region) into a dynamic and moving relationship with the whole (nation/world/universe). The mobility of a national-international form means that writers are able to remake the places they write from, while joining them up to a transnational serial polity. This is the uniquely scalar work of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman and the regional fiction. And in this model, unlike in Casanova’s, journalism and the media (theatres, poems, shows, pictures, songs, and melodrama) are equally as important as ‘literature’ as vehicles for moving representations of localized experience around. For example, as the next chapter will show, the journalism that Margaret Fuller sent out of Italy in 1848 was an important force in remaking American writing as part of a transnational serial reaction to the revolutions.

In 1848 and for long afterwards, people in not-yet Italy and not-yet Germany were writing national literature without a nation from which to write it. Fanny Lewald was acute about the difference between readerships in France and Germany: ‘[t]he French language has been made public property…Germans have not reached that point yet by any means. The contrast between the language of the intellectuals and the people’s way of expressing themselves is very great.”²¹ Emerson noticed the same thing. He observed that in England, ‘all the people in the street understand the best works’, whereas in Germany, ‘no sentiment, phrase, popular idea or expression from the works of Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Richter, or any other German writer is ever heard among the lower classes in Germany, because of the wide difference between their Plat Deutsche & the written language’.²² It was this disparity of language which had provoked Herder’s fantasy of the identity of the German people (volk) with a nation, a common language, and a national literature. Consequently, Herder rejected the French literary hegemony and exhorted German writers to ‘spew out the ugly slime of the Seine. Speak German, O You German’.²³ On the Italian peninsula, too, regional dialects divided ‘the people’, and illiteracy set most of them outside the public sphere of writing.²⁴ In Lombardy, Alessandro Manzoni’s story of ragged suffering and the victimization of the poor set in seventeenth-century Milan, I promessi sposi, had first appeared as a serial from 1825 to 1827 written in a language that Manzoni would later describe as ‘un composto indigesto di frasi un po’lombarde, un po’ toscane, un po’ francesi, un po’ anche latine; di frasi che non appartengono a nessuna di queste categorie, ma sono cavate per analogia e per estensione o dall’una o dall’altra di esse’ [an indigestible composite of sentences, a little bit Lombard, a bit Tuscan, a bit French, and even a bit Latin, of sentences which do not belong to any of these categories, but are extracted by analogy and by extension, from one or the other of those].²⁵ In the first four years after publication, ‘[i]t ran through nine editions in Italian, one in French, two in German and one in English’.²⁶ Manzoni issued it again, once more as a serial, from 1840 to 1842, this time expanded into a more complex narrative, and painstakingly rewritten in the Tuscan that by now he had decided was the purest form of the Italian language.²⁷ By 1847, he had formally announced his position on language reform. Tuscan, the language of both Dante and Petrarch, had been available as a model for a standard Italian language since the fourteenth century. Risorgimento Italy would be defined by not by a common language which was spoken all the time by everyone—there were too many dialects for that—but rather the institution of a national language that was available to all and would function as an official language. Manzoni recommended Tuscan to be taught as standard Italian in schools, setting to work to ‘rendere più universale in tutti gli ordini del popolo la notizia della buona lingua e della buona pronunzia’ [make universally available to all ranks of people the innovation of pure language and correct pronunciation].²⁸ The transposition into ‘pure’ Italian language marked a significant step in the novel becoming an important text of Italian nationalism, and it was during the 1840s that I promessi sposi was both established as ‘a national institution’ and co-opted into the international series of the ragged.²⁹ From the international seriality of 1848, a self-conscious ‘national literature’ was to emerge in Italy and in Britain as one of the most direct as well as one of the most contradictory results of the pan-European nationalist moment.

Manzoni and the ‘National Novel’

As one historian puts it, Manzoni came to ‘embod[y] the intellectual programme of the Risorgimento’, although I promessi sposi better embodies an earlier Catholic programme for reform, which crystallized around Pio Nono’s election as Pope in 1846, than the later anticlerical republican campaign after his flight from Rome in 1848.³⁰ Carlyle called the reforming Pio Nono a ‘simple pious creature’, who had awakened, ‘as no other man could do, the sleeping elements; mothers of the whirlwinds, conflagrations, earthquakes…All Europe exploded, boundless, uncontrollable; and we had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous, amazing, and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world ever saw’.³¹ It is true that Manzoni’s deeply Catholic novel reminds us that the liberal and reforming faction in Italy was by no means exclusively anticlerical. Christopher Clark has argued against ‘[t]he thesis that the nineteenth-century culture wars are best understood as the clash between liberal or republican “modernity” and a reactionary, regressive or obscurantist Catholicism’, and I promessi sposi offers us palpable evidence of a moderate and reform-minded Catholic position against the Austrian occupation.³² Perhaps unsurprisingly, Manzoni’s novel met with a mixed reception from Marxist critics in the twentieth century. In his hugely influential Quaderni del carcere, or Prison Notebooks (1929–35), the anticlerical Antonio Gramsci acknowledged the huge cultural influence of Manzoni’s work, but found him lacking: ‘Manzoni’s attitude towards the common people in his novel is the attitude of the Catholic Church toward the people: an attitude of benevolent condescension, as opposed to the notion of human identity’, he wrote, and accused Manzoni of finding ‘ “magnanimity”, “elevated thought” and “lofty feelings” only in some members of the upper class but never among the people, who as a whole are inferior, like animals’.³³ György Lukács disagreed, and declared that Manzoni was unique in having managed to overcome the ‘objective unfavourableness of Italian history [to]…create a real historical novel’.³⁴ For all Gramsci’s misgivings about the good faith of the representation of a ‘subaltern social group’ in I promessi sposi, the novel does accord moral agency to the poor.³⁵ And Manzoni goes further in his investigative piece Storia della colonna infame (1840–2) or, in English, The Column of Infamy (1845). In this important non-fiction text, he reviews the legal enquiry of 1630 into what had caused the spread of the Great Plague of Milan (1629–31) and he lays bare the systematic victimization and torture of the poor as untori, or ‘plague-spreaders’. ‘I giudizi criminali’, Manzoni complained, ‘e la povera gente, quand’è poca, non si riguardano come materia propriamente della storia’ [The judgements of criminal courts, and the poor people, when they are individuated, are not seen as a proper subject for history].³⁶ Manzoni appended this angry investigative essay to Italian editions of his novel after 1842 and he insisted that the two should be read together. Gramsci is probably right to smell paternalism in Mazoni’s writing, but at the same time the Storia della colonna infame is an astonishingly modern enquiry into historical inequality and abuse.

Manzoni’s historical novel, written in Milan under conditions of tight Austrian censorship, is set against the plague and the Thirty Years’ War in seventeenth-century Lombardy when the region was under direct Spanish rule.³⁷ A contemporarily resonant political plot is buried under the story of hypocritical Catholic hierarchies and a local tyrant of Spanish descent who tries (ultimately unsuccessfully) to thwart the marriage of two peasants. Its firm and committed insistence on the power of a pious and genuine Catholic faith means that Manzoni can make the suggestion—which might sound radical from another writer—that the ragged are not a necessary and immutable part of society, but a socially produced problem in need of a solution: ‘[f]rom time to time ragged and emaciated beggars came into view, some of whom had grown old in the trade, while others were now driven to it for the first time by necessity’.³⁸ Manzoni insists on the precarity of the working life, stressing how close to ragged even the master tradesmen are in a state that takes no moral or financial responsibility for its people.

Elizabeth Gaskell read Manzoni’s novel and knew it well in both its versions. Along with French, Gaskell had learnt Italian at her progressive boarding school, Avonbank, and she studied the Italian language with her father when she stayed with him in London in 1829.³⁹ Mary Thwaite thinks it ‘[v]ery likely her knowledge of Dante and the influential Italian novel by Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi, was well established before her marriage in 1832’.⁴⁰ Critics have often noticed that, in her 1863–4 serial Cousin Phillis, Gaskell has the worldly engineer Holdsworth suggest Manzoni’s novel as ‘just the thing for a beginner’, to help Phillis, who is trying to teach herself Italian.⁴¹ But Ford Madox Ford, ever a perceptive critic, saw something more substantial in Gaskell’s relationship with Manzoni than this passing reference to his work in Cousin Phillis might suggest:

[I promessi sposi] is written with a sort of unsleeping fire—which was, perhaps, no more than the fire of the Risorgimento. And the passion of an exciting time will every now and then so influence an author that he will be sedulous to give you always more and more exactitude in the reproduction of an unhappy time. Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton, almost dispassionate as it is, will do almost more to make you understand—and so sympathize with—the miseries of the poverty of her day—than will a wilderness of Dickens’s tomes.⁴²

Ford Madox Ford’s intuition that Gaskell’s writing shares Manzoni’s ‘unsleeping fire’ is worth unpicking because, just as I promessi sposi became a key text for Risorgimento nationalism in Italy, Gaskell’s Mary Barton was written as a self-consciously ‘national’ novel in England at a time of intense international upheaval.

Manzoni’s seventeenth-century Milan and Gaskell’s nineteenth-century Manchester draw very close in these two novels. As the hero of Manzoni’s novel, Renzo, walks towards Milan, he finds a loaf of bread which has been thrown on the ground, and then notices the people: ‘[t]heir clothes, or rather rags, were covered with flour; and there were streaks of flour on their faces, which were contorted and fiery red’ (227). What Renzo does not yet know is that he is approaching Milan during a bread riot because the price of bread has been put up by the Spanish. ‘He walked on, now moving briskly, and now held up by the crowd, but always watching and listening in the hope of gathering a clearer idea of what was going on from the continual buzz of conversation’ (241). Manzoni’s riot offers a neat example of Sartrean seriality, avant la lettre:

the evening before Renzo reached Milan, the city’s streets and squares had been swarming with men. Possessed by a common anger and dominated by a common thought, all of them, whether they knew each other or not, began to form into groups. They joined forces without any prearrangement, almost without being aware that they were doing so, like drops of water coming together as they run down the same slope. (235)⁴³

Manzoni’s stunning image of collective action ‘like drops of water coming together’ perfectly expresses how people unknown to one another can be ‘dominated by a common thought’. The catalyst was wanting ‘[t]o convert words into deeds, all that was needed was a chance, a push, an initial movement of any kind; and it was not long before one occurred’ (235). When a bread delivery boy appears on the streets, the riot ignites, and the cry goes up, ‘[w]e’re human beings too, we need bread as much as anyone else’ (236). Sartre takes as an example of an indirect series the Great Fear of 1789, when peasant revolts, without being aware of one another, erupted in five different regions of the French countryside with Paris as ‘the mediating third’. ‘Rather than being an outcome of premeditated collectivity’, explains Firat Oruc, ‘the revolts depended instead on the sense of alterity toward the aristocrats and the brigands and the felt interchangeability with other peasants.’⁴⁴

In Manzoni’s novel, there then occurs a moment that surely stayed with Gaskell. An armed crowd besieging a bakery is addressed by the captain of police who urges restraint:

‘Drop those iron bars! Down with your hands! It’s a disgraceful thing for you Milanese to do, who are so famous for your good nature. You’ve always been such good lads…Bastards!’ The sudden change in his style was caused by a stone which left the hand of one of the good lads, flew through the air, and struck the captain on the forehead. (238–9)

Manzoni’s brilliant crowd scene reappears in slightly altered form in Gaskell’s 1854–6 novel North and South, when the heroine, Margaret Hale, attempts to address a furious gathering of factory workers:

‘For God’s sake! Do not damage your cause by this violence. You do not know what you are doing.’ She strove to make her words distinct.

A sharp pebble flew by her, grazing her forehead and cheek, and drawing a blinding sheet of light before her eyes.⁴⁵

Manzoni’s riot scene in I promessi sposi pushes representation of the ragged to the limit. He forebears to report everything: one of the rioters ‘holding a ragged neckcloth to his tousled bleeding scalp…uttered words which we cannot repeat here’ (241). Meanwhile, the plague sweeps indiscriminately through Milan, so that ‘workmen and their masters from every type of manufacture or craft’ are to be seen ‘leaning against the corners of buildings, lying huddled on the paving-stones…exhausted and shivering with cold or hunger in their scanty, ragged clothing’ (514) and women beg in the streets with ‘weeping babies, too weak to sit up, and clad in scanty rags,…held up in their mother’s arms, so that they could be seen from farther away’ (521). The ranking of trades, ‘from the most ordinary to the most refined, from the most necessary to the most sophisticated’ (514) makes no difference during the plague: they are all dying in rags, the ‘social scum’ along with the ‘intelligent artisans’. The ragged are dying, but they are dying in plain sight in what Manzoni, remarkably, calls a ‘public disaster’ (521). The novel insists on the visual overload of this disaster, which is not hidden away but is taking place in public spaces, on the streets, stressing the ‘continual sight of a misery whose magnitude went not only beyond the bounds of what could be remedied, but also beyond the bounds of what could be pitied’ (521). Words which cannot be repeated, and visible misery too terrible even to be pitied: Manzoni shows that the ragged exist at the very limits of representation, but he insists on representing them nevertheless. I promessi sposi brings the ragged, quite literally, into the public sphere. His novel spawned many imitators, so that the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini declared of ‘[t]he school of Manzoni’ that ‘[i]ts aim, its creed, its pervading feeling, is the moral and social reinstatement of the People’.⁴⁶

In 1847, Marx and Engels were suggesting that the effects of internationally serialized factory labour were problematic: ‘modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped [the working man] of every trace of national character’.⁴⁷ But, they maintained, ‘the struggle…is at first a national struggle’.⁴⁸ Here is the contradiction at the heart of 1848: ‘inter-nationalism’ was an unfinished serial—risky, incoherent, and contingent. ‘Europe’ was no abstracted confederacy of equals, but rather a chain-reaction in process. And the process was bloody and messy. National revolutions chasing after one another served to expose the unevenness of development in different parts of Europe. The revolutionary poet of ‘Young Germany’, Georg Herwegh, was in Paris in 1848 trying to persuade France to supply troops and guns to help establish a German republic, but Fanny Lewald judges these to be ‘premature dreams’: ‘[h]is imagination makes him believe that Germany is at the same developmental stage that France has just now reached’, she says, but she adds, ‘you cannot chase out thirty-eight rulers and make a whole country out of thirty-eight separate peoples in one fell swoop. How gladly we would want to believe in the possibility of a republican constitution in Germany now—if only we could!’⁴⁹ Germany would not be unified (and then not as a republic) until 1871, and Italy, too, would not finally achieve full unification and nation status until 1870. Nevertheless, the revolutions of 1848 had already suggested these national eventualities, and even in Britain where there was no revolution, the ragged were demanding a new national social contract.

Manchester Rags

Staying in the capital city of nineteenth-century textile production, Manchester, in 1847 Emerson wrote home to his wife Lidian:

My dearest little Edie, to tell you the truth, costs me many a penny, day by day. I cannot go up the street but I shall see some woman in rags with a little creature just of Edie’s age & size, but in coarsest ragged clothes & barefooted, stepping beside her…Bid Ellen & Edie thank God that they were born in new England…and I hope they & theirs will not stand barefooted in the mud on a bridge in the rain all day to beg of passengers.⁵⁰

In 1840s England, rags were becoming newly and powerfully representative, less of material poverty than of social inequality. In the Preface to Oliver Twist in 1837, Dickens wrote, ‘I will not…abate one hole in the Dodger’s coat, or one scrap of curl-paper in [Nancy’s] dishevelled hair’, insisting on the social importance of those who are clad in ‘shabby rags that scarcely hold together’.⁵¹ In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), window panes are ‘broken and stuffed with rags’ and ‘thin bones are seen through…ragged clothes’.⁵² The deputation of five working men ‘[t]ramp, tramp’ with their ‘heavy clogged feet’ to confront the mill owners in this almost-Chartist novel, and ‘air-gaps were to be seen in their garments’ (182). The men’s raggedness is caricatured, literally, by Harry Carson who sketches them satirically as ‘lank, ragged, dispirited, and famine-stricken’ (184). Gaskell was well aware of the political resonance of ‘famine-stricken’: as she was finishing her novel in 1847, the famine in Ireland was entering its second year. In Ireland a year or so later in 1849, the famine well under way, Andrew Dickinson would write of ‘half-starved tatterdemalions, with no covering but a few ancient rags dangling from knees to elbow’.⁵³ Gaskell remembered very clearly the years 1839–42, in which her story is set, when she had witnessed the desperation of the Manchester poor and ‘[w]hole families went through a gradual starvation. They only wanted a Dante to record their sufferings. And yet even his words would fall short of the awful truth; they could only present an outline of the tremendous facts of the destitution that surrounded thousands upon thousands in the terrible years 1839, 1840, and 1841’ (84).⁵⁴ Engels was in the city in 1844 and recorded the ‘hateful and repulsive spectacle’ in a different tone: ‘[a] horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles’.⁵⁵ When John Forster recommended Gaskell’s book to Chapman and Hall on her behalf in 1848, it proved timely as ‘its substance had renewed topicality’.⁵⁶ In her Preface to Mary Barton Gaskell quietly remarks that her impression of the ‘state of feeling among too many of the factory-people in Manchester…has received some confirmation from the events which have so recently occurred among a similar class on the Continent’ (4). Although her novel is technically a historical one, its action starting a decade or so before its publication, she writes revealingly in the ‘Preface’ as if it were contemporary, drawing explicit attention to the likeness of her protagonists to a ‘similar class’ in Continental Europe.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s work has been persistently misrecognized and underestimated. In 1977, Robert Selig included Gaskell’s oeuvre briefly in Weltliteratur only to pull it out again fast: ‘[a]lthough Gaskell was below “the intellectual level” of Goethe, Manzoni, Hugo, Scott, and Dickens, she, like them, left, in Mary Barton, a book that records in a memorable way a time of “upheaval” ’.⁵⁷ Kathleen Tillotson’s assessment of Mary Barton is equally contradictory: although she allows it is ‘a distinguished and memorable novel’, she feels that ‘[it] is hardly of the scale or the quality’ of other novels of the period.⁵⁸ But properly to understand the scale of Gaskell’s Mary Barton as a ‘national novel’, we need to reinsert her into the European context from which she was writing in the 1840s. If we can replace Mary Barton in its full context in 1848 as one of a series of literary representations of the ragged of Europe, we can at last free it from the tedious restrictions of the English ‘social problem novel’ and see it for what it really is: as serious a contribution to the world literature of 1848 as the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels that was published (in German) in the same year.

Gaskell’s Mary Barton and the Ragged Series

There are a great number of rags in Mary Barton, but not—as Carolyn Steedman has noticed—a rag rug. Misremembering a rag rug in the Bartons’ parlour (instead they have ‘a gay-coloured piece of oil cloth’ on the floor), Steedman describes the rag shortages in the 1840s and admonishes herself for misunderstanding an economy ‘where scarcity and technological development created a shortage not of the poor, but of traditional symbols of the poor, their rags’, so that ‘even a handful of tattered clothing was worth the trip to the rag merchant, reckoned as it was until the late 19th century, at half a loaf of bread’.⁵⁹ Steedman’s classic article is an exemplary reflection on our false assumptions about the past, although rags do get recycled in the novel, albeit into quilts rather than rag rugs. Alice Wilson remembers in her youth ‘working hard at patchwork’ (32) till ‘my quilt were all done to th’ lining’ (33), and Mary’s rival for Jem’s attentions, Molly Gibson, makes a gift to Jane Wilson of a ‘splendid red and yellow patch quilt’ which Mary is reluctantly forced to admire, ‘border, centre, and ground-work, right side and wrong’ (123).

Mary Barton is a textile story.⁶⁰ Indeed, the textiles often help to mark time and tell the story of the decline of the Bartons’ fortunes, as when Mary’s ‘pretty new blue merino’ frock (31) gets ‘old…and a bit worn at elbows’ (276) and ‘her old black gown (her best when her mother died)’ is ‘sponged, and turned, and lengthened’ (73) into mourning dress for Mrs Davenport (73). John Barton’s ‘better coat’ (60) is pawned to pay for food and medicine for his friend Davenport, then redeemed, but his ‘one gay red-and-yellow silk pocket-handkerchief’ (61) never makes it back from the pawnshop. The ‘draggled’ alcoholic prostitute, Mary’s Aunt Esther, is dressed in ‘faded finery…the gauze bonnet, once pink, now dirty white’ (124). Over the course of the story, the fabric of the novel quite literally deteriorates and shreds into rags. Clothes and accessories are inventoried precisely: as well as her merino wool, Mary also owns a cotton ‘every-day gown’ in a lilac ‘Hoyle’s print’ (274) and a ‘plaid shawl’ (236).⁶¹ Her friend ‘the young workwoman’ (30) Margaret Jennings similarly owns only two dresses: a ‘brown stuff gown, [and] the blue and yellow print’ (193). But as seamstresses, Mary and Margaret both work with much finer fabrics: they sew ‘beautifully fine soft bombazine’ (46) and ‘bits of muslin and shades of silk’ (72–3). By the time he travels to London with the Chartist petition, Mary’s father is down to his last two shirts, both of which she launders carefully for his trip. Some of his colleagues have no shirts at all: one recognizes himself in Harry Carson’s caricature, “Lord! how like; that’s me, by G—, it’s the very way I’m obligated to pin my waistcoat up, to hide that I’ve gotten no shirt’ (187). Job Legh points to the injustice of ‘thousands and thousands o’ poor weavers as han only gotten one shirt i’ the world; ay, and don’t know where t’ get another when that rag’s done, though they’re turning out miles o’ calico every day’ (88). The balance of production and consumption is terribly askew, so that the textile weavers’ ‘children [are] born on wet flags, without a rag t’ cover’em’ (88–9). The ‘strange alternations between work and want’ (3) in the factory economy are charted by the gradual disbursement of textiles and stripping down of clothing, in the descent from the Bartons’ snug little parlour with the ‘blue-and-white check curtains’ (14) to the ‘ragged detachment’ (182) of workmen who visit the masters, to the meeting of ‘shivering, half-clad m[e]n’ (87) discussing the Chartist petition that John Barton is to take to London.

What is perhaps just as significant as the misremembering of the social significance of rags in Mary Barton is a gender blindness which forgets that ‘high proportions of the labour force employed in manufacturing were female, especially in the newer textile industries’.⁶² Gaskell’s textile novel knows this, and it is as full of ‘workwomen’(140) as of workmen. If it is an industrial novel, then it is one concerned with a peculiarly female industry. In Serial Forms, I discussed some of Gaskell’s earliest published fiction, which appeared in the radical-liberal periodical Howitt’s Journal run by Gaskell’s friends Mary and William Howitt. I used these early stories to show her sophisticated awareness of the politics of reproduction and production in an industrializing society which was rendering the lives of its workforce more and more precarious.⁶³ Although Gaskell’s close and material understanding of fluctuating patterns of employment and her radical political sympathies have begun to be better understood in recent years, Mary Barton has been consistently misidentified since Raymond Williams classified it under the heading ‘The Industrial Novel’.⁶⁴ Williams conceded that it was ‘the most moving response in literature to the industrial suffering of the 1840s’, which ‘might have been a great novel of its kind’ if only the focus had not shifted from John to Mary Barton.⁶⁵ Emily Steinlight crisply sums up the problem with Williams’s judgement here: ‘[b]y this account, the novel ceases to be about class when it starts to be about women’.⁶⁶ The Marxist Williams is only recapitulating Marx’s own position in The Communist Manifesto, the text that Marx and Engels were writing in the same year that Gaskell was finishing Mary Barton. Although she did not know it, Gaskell was writing against the Marxist view of gendered ‘workmen’, against Marx and Engels’s fear that the proletariat might be seen as feminized and therefore weak, and against the Marxist defence of bourgeois family structures and women’s presumed need for male protection.⁶⁷ Mary Barton quite deliberately resists this gendered version of ‘work’. Far from a capitulation to an empty melodramatic and romantic resolution, then, Mary Barton poses a radical question about gender and work which seems to have remained under the radar ever since the book was written—for even at its publication in 1848, ‘Mary Barton seems to have escaped all allegations of treacherous tendencies or seditious effect’.⁶⁸ Its female authorship helped to disguise its radicalism, just as happened to German writer Fanny Lewald’s 1845 novella about the ragged poor and the cotton industry, Der dritte Stande [The Third Estate]. A passage inveighing against the apathy of the rich towards the poor was initially selected for censorship by the German government, until the Censor decided not to ‘pursue the matter further because the novella was written “by a woman” ’, and so allowed its publication.⁶⁹ In her own defence, Lewald invoked the chiffonniers of Germany, arguing that ‘the starving men and women on large estates who collect rags for the paper manufactures’ were unlikely to be reading her story, distracted as they were by their own ‘trembling limbs [and]…the whimpering of their starving children’.⁷⁰ The economics of the chiffonnier trade on the large agrarian estates of Prussia was different, no doubt, to those in Paris, but the seriality of the ragged moved across different political regimes and across areas of economic growth and relatively stagnant regions.⁷¹

In 1848, Gaskell herself certainly also saw her novel as belonging to this important and ongoing series of international events. In the spring of 1848, as the Second French Republic and Provisional Government were being established, she wrote repeatedly and anxiously to Edward Chapman, her publisher, asking when her book would come out. In late March she wrote, ‘I can not help fancying the tenor of my tale is such as to excite attention at the present time of struggle on the part of work people to obtain what they esteem their rights’; at the beginning of April she wrote again, ‘the present state of public events may not be unfavourable to a tale, founded in some measure on the presen[t] relations between Masters and work people’; and in mid-April, still not having heard from him, and exasperated that the book that she thought ‘would have been published by this time’ had still not appeared, she expresses for a third time her disappointment, ‘repeating my own belief that the tale would bear directly upon the present circumstances’.⁷² When it was finally published that Autumn, it was read not only in England, but across Europe: Gaskell writes to Mary Ewart that ‘I am highly amused at the French ladies puzzling out the Lancashire’, and she wrote to Edward Chapman (possibly disingenuously) that ‘I had no idea it would have proved such a fire brand’.⁷³

The Right to Work

John Barton’s statement ‘I want work, and it is my right. I want work’ (115) connects Gaskell’s novel directly and unequivocally to the European revolutions that were under way as she wrote. The ‘labour question’ was the serial question across Europe in the 1840s, as Gaskell well knew, since ‘[t]he principle of the “right to work” originated in the French revolutions of 1789 and 1848 as a demand for jobs from the state for the relief of the poor.’⁷⁴ Unemployment was rising sharply everywhere, and social welfare was a pressing and visible issue.⁷⁵ In Prussia, the state had nearly bankrupted itself on the Napoleonic Wars, and privately funded railway-building projects had dried up, throwing many out of work. In 1843, Flora Tristran in L’union ouverière [The Workers’ Union] had written, ‘[f]or the worker, the right to live is the right to work, the only right that can give him the possibility of eating and thus of living’.⁷⁶ Tristan advocated an international ‘universal union of working men and women’, and insisted on the ‘right to work’ underwritten by state-funded full employment. She had seen and described abject poverty in Lyons, but even she was shocked by the ‘rags of the English worker’ in the manufacturing cities of England, where ‘[m]ost of the workers lack clothing, a bed, furniture, a fire, wholesome food’.⁷⁷ Tristan’s work was to have an important influence on Engels and Marx and their call to ‘the ever-expanding union of the workers’ in the Communist Manifesto.⁷⁸ The casting of labour rights as human rights was a live topic in 1848, intersecting with abolition debates, because the right to work was also seen as the right to the freedom of choice of work.⁷⁹

Many of the characters in Mary Barton are economic migrants who have come to Manchester after hearing ‘what terrible lots of work was to be had, both for lads and lasses’ (31) in the city. John Barton, though, is, ‘a thorough specimen of a Manchester man; born of factory workers’ (7) and ‘a good, steady workman, and, as such, pretty certain of steady employment’ (24). He ‘believed himself able, to supply all his wants by his own exertions’ (24). But ‘his master suddenly failed, and all hands in that mill were turned back, one Tuesday morning’ (24). Barton goes from ‘factory to factory, asking for work’ (24) but he can find none: ‘some were working short hours, some were turning off hands, and for weeks Barton was out of work, living on credit’ (25).

During the course of the novel, almost all of the men find themselves out of work or on ‘short hours’ (24) or ‘on tramp for work’ (65).⁸⁰ Even Jem Wilson who ‘worked with one of the great firms of engineers’ (29) loses his post as foreman, and, although he tells Mary ‘I shall soon get work again, never fear’ (360) it is only in Canada that he is eventually able to find new employment. The humiliation, impotent fury, and depression felt by the unemployed men is keenly observed. George Wilson ‘longed to be once more in work’(61); his wife worries ‘[h]ere’s George out o’ work, and more cast down than ever I seed him’ (77). John Barton becomes ‘mechanical’ and ‘clockwork’ without work (346). But ‘there was no work to be had, and consequently no wages to pay for the bread the children cried aloud for’ (58) and ‘there is no coal for the grate, and no clothes for the bed, and the thin bones are seen through the ragged clothes’ (11). It is left to the women in the novel to provide, although their wages are a fraction of the men’s. It is Mary who ‘sat sadly at her sewing, trying to earn a few pence by working over hours at some mourning’ (129) and who works late into the night: ‘she never left off work until (if the poor servants paid her pretty regularly for the odd jobs of mending she did for them) she had earned a few pence, enough for one good meal for her father on the next day’ (14). And it is her friend Margaret, once she establishes herself as a professional singer, who offers financial aid to Mary and her father. Engels wrote in The Condition of the Working Class that:

In many cases the family is not wholly dissolved by the employment of the wife, but turned upside down. The wife supports the family, the husband sits at home, tends the children, sweeps the room and cooks…this condition, which unsexes the man and takes from the woman all womanliness, without being able to bestow upon the man true womanliness, or the woman true manliness…is the last result of our much-praised civilisation.⁸¹

This is not Gaskell’s view.⁸² In Mary Barton, the women protect their men and work to provide for them, and the men nurse their women and children and care for them without the leisure to bother too much about ‘true manliness’ and ‘true womanliness’.

In Manchester, the women’s options are limited to factory work, domestic service, paid child-minding, shopwork, dressmaking, and prostitution. All these trades are represented in a novel in which every character is primarily identified by their relationship to their waged labour. Molly Gibson works in the ‘provision shop around the corner’ (122) and Mrs Ogden ‘keeps the greengrocer’s shop in Oxford Road’ (46). Mary starts as a dressmaker at Miss Simmonds, ‘with a small quarterly salary (paid quarterly, because so much more genteel than by the week), a very small one, divisible into a minute weekly pittance’ (27). Alice Wilson is a washerwoman, doing ‘a hard day’s wash’ taking a ‘half-day’s work at some tradesman’s house’ when she can get it (29). Margaret is a home-worker who ‘does plain work,’ and takes in ‘any black work’ (sewing mourning clothes) she can get, even though her eyes are failing. Davenport’s widow ‘took in some little children to nurse’ during the day, and ‘at night, she set to work at plain sewing, ‘seam, and gusset, and band’ (74). ‘Folk mun live’ (49), as Margaret says.

Being out of work is catastrophic, but even in work the hours and conditions are brutal, as described in the ‘beautiful little poem’ (113) by Samuel Bamford that Margaret copies out for her father: ‘The wearying loom doth call them up at morn, | They work till worn-out nature sinks to sleep’ (112).⁸³ Jem Wilson works long nights and comes home ‘all grimed and dirty from his night-work, his soiled apron wrapped round his middle’ (78). The day after his twin brothers have both died, ‘Jem mun work’, and he is, ‘[w]orking over-hours at th’ shop. They’n getten a large order fra’ forrin parts; and yo know, Jem mun work, though his heart’s well-nigh breaking for these poor laddies’ (77). For all that Miss Simmonds is a ‘respectable’ (27) milliner and dressmaker, whose ‘workwomen were called “her young ladies” ’ (27), Mary still has to work in a ‘close monotonous work-room’ (156) and has no fixed hours but is only permitted to leave when all her work is done. When she was in domestic service, Alice Wilson had a ‘missis’ who was ‘terribly strict’ (33) and would not even allow her to attend her own mother’s funeral. Only the ‘handsome young Mr. Carson’ (80) is entirely ‘unfettered by work-hours’ (80).

Waged labour is not the only kind of work in the book. In between the fixed worktimes, there is ‘cleaning…cooking…washing and such-like work’ (120) and household ‘dirty work, such as washing up dishes’ (15). Mary is seen holding her father’s collars with ‘soapy fingers’ on her way to the mangle (87), and she is ‘ironing’ (191) when Will Wilson calls by. She often does her housework early in the morning before leaving the house, trying to ‘arrange its disorder before going to her work’ (90). And alongside domestic work, there is the ‘work o’ love’ (109), the affective labour of care which also demands time and commitment. Alice Wilson nurses sick children through the night, ‘though may be she’s to be at her work by six next morning’ (12). And when Alice herself is dying, Mrs Davenport sits up although ‘she’s hard-worked all day’ (216); and Margaret is ‘worn out by a long working, watching night’ (44). Mary, after a night helping with the sick Wilson twins, tries to ‘get a little sleep before work hour’ (79). John Barton nurses the starving Davenport family, making some gruel, ‘with the useful skill of a working-man…[then] he seized a battered iron table-spoon…and with it he forced one or two drops between [Mrs Davenport’s] clenched teeth’ (62). Jem risks his life in a fire at Carsons’ Mill to save his father (62).⁸⁴ These are highly resourceful people. Even as ‘a girl of thirteen, fond of power’ (17) Mary displays considerable intelligence and strength of character and, as she grows, she acquires ‘the savoir faire of a town-bred girl’ (413). The ‘practical, shrewd, hard-working men’ (39) with their passions and their gifts—Job Legh’s brilliance in entomological studies, for example, or his granddaughter’s ‘really scientific knowledge’ (37) of singing—all suggest a reservoir of unrecognized and untapped national talent. Gaskell is surprisingly matter-of-fact in the language she uses to describe the despoiling and waste of these talents. Esther’s trade is named—twice—for what it is: she is ‘a prostitute’ (158 and 238); John Barton’s literate curiosity, reading ‘an old Northern Star, borrowed from a neighbouring public-house’ (82), turns to bitterness and violence and he assaults his daughter: ‘it was a hard blow, and blistered and reddened Mary’s soft white skin with pain’ (117). Once unemployed, he becomes addicted to opium. Mrs Ogden’s husband ‘drank himself to death’ (46) leaving her in debt as he ‘laid hands on every farthing he could get for drink’ (46), and Esther is similarly controlled by her chronic alcoholism: ‘I must have drink’, she explains (164). Starvation, prostitution, alcoholism, drug addiction, and domestic violence: Gaskell tells us bluntly what are the human results of unregulated trade.

Nevertheless, Gaskell is insistent on the powerful affective ties of the mill community. Cooperation and mutual aid helps people to keep themselves and their families in waged work, but she is also careful to audit the exorbitant amount of time and the different kinds of hard work needed to maintain such ties. This is a radical form of audit, as she herself suggests in the novel: ‘[b]ut remember! We only miss those who do men’s work in their humble sphere; the aged, the feeble, the children, when they die, are hardly noted by the world’ (113). The aged, the feeble, and the children all need to be daily cared for in health and nursed when they are sick and dying. So when Gregory Vargo claims that ‘[t]he repeated scenes of Mary and her friend Margaret sewing late into the night are the only depiction of work in the novel, a fact rarely noticed in critical interpretations’, he is wrong.⁸⁵ Work—waged, domestic, reproductive, and affective—is ubiquitous to the point of invisibility in Mary Barton, but work is the main subject of the novel and work appears on every page.⁸⁶ When Gaskell has the millowner, Mr Carson, protest that ‘[w]e cannot regulate the demand for labour’ (384), she makes Job Legh reply: ‘it’s come to a hard pass when a man would give aught in the world for work to keep his children from starving, and can’t get a bit, if he’s ever so willing to labour’ (384). Gaskell was not, as so many of her critics have suggested, an apologist for the middle classes.⁸⁷ On the contrary, she took a radical interest in worker-led associational, cooperative and unionized labour schemes.⁸⁸

Gaskell’s descriptions of the interiors of the houses of the poor have most often been tagged to the Parliamentary Blue Books and Sanitary Reform reports, presumed to be ‘borrow[ed] from the staples of the documentary discourse on housing with which Gaskell was well acquainted’.⁸⁹ In the Davenports’ dark ‘foetid’ cellar in Mary Barton, John Barton makes out in the gloom ‘three or four little children rolling on the damp, nay wet, brick floor, through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up; the fire-place was empty and black; the wife sat on her husband’s chair, and cried in the dark loneliness’ (60). But these scenes also share in a pan-European revolutionary rhetoric. For example, Benjamin Gastineau, a working-class Jewish typographer in Paris who read Proudhon and later became a journalist, spent 1848 working for a Republican newspaper, La Voix du Peuple, while writing and printing cheap propagandist stories in pamphlets. His Comment finissent les pauvres: étude sociale [What becomes of the poor: a social study] was sold on the streets of Paris for 10 centimes. It opens with a description of ‘L’intérieur du pauvre’ [The interior of a poor man’s house]. In Gastineau’s story, the Manchester cellar has become a Parisian grenier [attic], but the ragged inhabitants are identical in their hunger and misery to the Davenport family: ‘une femme éplorée’ [a weeping woman] lying ‘sur un mauvais matelas posé à terre…les cheveux épars, tenant dans ces bras, et cherchant à réchauffer, trois petits enfans en haillons qui pleuraient comme leur mère.’ [on a nasty mattress on the floor, her hair dishevelled, hugging and trying to warm three little children in rags who were all crying like their mother].⁹⁰ The grenier and the cellar are interchangeable. The father of this French starving family is, like Davenport, out of work. At the climax of the story, the unemployed blacksmith Pierre Delatre (who becomes known as Pierre-le-Raisonneur, or, Pierre the Reasoner) confronts a bourgeois banker:

Misérable! n’est-tu pas plus que moi voleur et assassin?…J’ai volé, il est vrai, j’ai volé après avoir vainement cherché a occupier mes bras…J’ai volé, parce que ma femme et mes enfants avaient faim…Ma toi, honorable banquier! n’as-tu pas impunément exploité et affamé les ouvriers que tu as vus d’un air calme mourir à l’hôpital, après avoir recueilli le produit de leurs efforts, après les avoir saignés jusqu’à la dernière goutte…Nous sommes deux voleurs, honorable banquier! Mais tu savais ton code…tu es honnête selon la loi. Tu es le roi de la société, et j’en suis l’esclave! […] Je serai le galérien, toi l’honnête homme…Voilà la justice sociale!⁹¹

[You wretch! Are you not more of a thief and an assassin than me? I stole, it’s true, I stole after I looked in vain for work for my hands. I stole because my wife and my children were hungry. But you, honourable banker! Have you not exploited with impunity and starved the workers that you have watched calmly as they die in the hospital, having collected the product of their efforts, having bled them to the last drop!…We are two thieves, honourable banker! But you obeyed your code…you are honest before the law. You are the king of society, and I am its slave!…I will be the galley-slave, you the honest man. This is social justice!]

Gaskell, a Minister’s wife in Manchester, and the Republican Gastineau in Paris, who started life as an ouvrier (workman), are making exactly the same argument at exactly the same time: that it is lack of secure work and the immiseration of the workers which pushes them ultimately to crime and violence, and that capitalism is creating a new and urgent politics of labour.

After Mary Barton

In 1849, in the immediate wake of the European revolutions, Gaskell was in London being thoroughly lionized as the author of Mary Barton. There she met, for the first time, Eliza Fox, the daughter of the radical Unitarian and MP William Johnson Fox. Eliza, whom Gaskell came to call Tottie, quickly became one of her closest friends. Eliza was part of the same radical circle as the Howitts, along with ‘witty’ Douglas Jerrold, who between 1845 and 1848 was publishing Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine.⁹² Another of Gaskell’s close friends, the Mancunian Emily Winkworth, was staying in Islington and had just become engaged to a lawyer, William Shaen: the couple would be married by William Gaskell in 1851. These radical Unitarians were very active on behalf of the revolutionary European exiles in Britain in this period: in the early 1840s, William Shaen had helped the exiled Giuseppe Mazzini establish a school for poor Italian children in London.⁹³ And during her stay in London, Gaskell visited Jerrold’s newly founded club for the people: the Whittington Club, where she attended a dinner ‘to honour Louis Blanc’.⁹⁴ The exiled Blanc, who had been the architect of the Parisian ateliers during the Revolution, was himself a member of the Whittington. William Wells Brown remembered encountering him there in October 1849, ‘one of the French refugees’, who ‘held in his hand a copy of La Presse, and as soon as he was seated, opened it and began to devour its contents’.⁹⁵

Discussion about the forthcoming parliamentary elections in France for the first National Assembly of the Second Republic (on 14 and 15 May) was partially eclipsed in London in the spring of 1849 by news from Italy, particularly by updates on Mazzini’s besieged Roman Republic and its imminent bombardment by Austrian and French troops. The friends followed events in Italy day by day. Emily Winkworth breaks off writing a letter to her sister to consult The Times, explaining that ‘foreign news…is really almost a necessity of life just now!’, and reports that ‘Mrs. Gaskell has heard a very short note just received from Mazzini giving the news of their determination to resist, while they could at least’.⁹⁶ The European revolutions continued to transform political discourse in Britain. On this London trip, Gaskell heard Professor Frederick Maurice give a sermon, and on 12 May she had ‘good long talks’ with Maurice and John Ludlow, ‘and all about the right things and nothing else’.⁹⁷ She discovered that, in addition to Maurice’s work with the Ragged Schools movement, the men were visiting ‘all the lowest “People”s Meetings”’ but that ‘they have met with the highest principle, especially upon social questions, among the Socialists’.⁹⁸ In a direct response to the revolutions on the Continent, in May 1848 Maurice and his friends had launched a weekly paper, Politics for the People.⁹⁹ Maurice was clear about his allegiance to Continental socialism: ‘[t]he socialism I speak of, is that of Owen, Fourier, Louis Blanc—of the Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, who have fraternised with them or produced systems of their own’.¹⁰⁰ At the start of 1850, Maurice wrote to Kingsley: ‘I do not see my way farther than this. Competition is put forth as the law of the universe. That is a lie. The time is come for us to declare that it is a lie by word and deed. I see no way but associating for work instead of for strikes.’¹⁰¹

Gaskell was in full agreement that the ragged should be allowed to work and to make a living.¹⁰² The position was a truly radical one, and very far from the laissez faire free-trade orthodoxy of the Manchester liberal middle classes. In November 1849 she wrote to Tottie Fox: ‘I want to ask you and Mr Fox if you know anything of a co-operative tailors’ shop established by Prof. Maurice,…&c….. [and Kingsley]…on Louis Blanc’s principle, Jules Chevalier for a guide, in the New Road, or Tottenham Court Road (they’re the same thing aren’t they…).’¹⁰³ The Working Tailors’ Association was the Christian Socialists’ response to the ‘right to work’ articulated in all the European revolutions, and these cooperative shops were modelled on the Parisian ateliers.¹⁰⁴ The idea of establishing working-men’s cooperatives had come initially from Ludlow who had visited Paris during 1848 and seen Louis Blanc’s ateliers in operation.¹⁰⁵ Maurice’s association was for males only, but ateliers des femmes had been run during the 1848 revolution in Paris too, which offered sewing and ‘piecing’ work to unemployed women.¹⁰⁶ Most of the women in the Paris workshops were workers in the garment trade.¹⁰⁷ Maurice supported the idea of cooperatives ‘for showing how a human relationship may be substituted for the mere animal connexion between Driver and Slave’.¹⁰⁸ He felt that Chartism must be met by ‘confuting its unrighteous pretensions, [and] by satisfying its righteous demands’.¹⁰⁹ And Gaskell enthusiastically agreed. In the 1840s she was not viewing Chartism and trade unionism from the vantage point of a subsequent Marxist labour history, as distinct or complete movements, nor, crucially, as exclusively British. She saw them as part of an ongoing and messy pan-European crisis. The woman who took Manzoni’s work as her model, dined with Louis Blanc, and longed to meet Mazzini was better informed about European revolutionary politics, more aware of gender issues in the politics of labour, and certainly more angry than she has ever been given credit for. ‘I think I must be a very improper woman without knowing it’, she wrote to Tottie, ‘I do so manage to shock people’.¹¹⁰

But what of Elizabeth Gaskell’s regionalism? Mary Barton is tethered firmly to a particular time and a particular place, so how could this ‘Tale of Manchester Life’ possibly scale up to ‘world literature’? For sure, Gaskell’s regionalism is important to understanding her relationship to the national. As Paul Readman has argued, in the mid nineteenth century ‘Manchester became an integral part of the patriotic landscape imaginary, its urban environment supporting rather than contradicting mainstream constructions of national identity’, and Gaskell’s novels form part of that imaginary.¹¹¹ But Mary Barton is not a book about Manchester per se. It is a book about the textile industry and about the politics of a process of industrialisation which Gaskell knew from her German, French, and Swiss friends resident in Manchester to be a serial one across Europe. Her careful glossing of Lancashire dialect terms in the novel has often been used as further evidence of the class mediation (and bad faith) of her text, explaining a working-class world to a middle-class reader.¹¹² But we could hear this local dialect differently. We could hear those Lancashire words as just as foreign (or as unforeign) as French or German ones, so that Manchester could just as well be Lyons, or Frankfurt: its dialect not a limiting regionalism, but rather a marker of a universalist language-equivalence. Far from fetichising the parochial and the local, the Bildungsroman and the regional fiction are telling a story about joining up to a transnational polity. In this reading, Gaskell’s project seems to touch on that of the contemporaneous Communist Manifesto after all. Marx and Engels called for their manifesto to ‘be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages’.¹¹³ Martin Puchner suggests that ‘Marx and Engels place German in the middle of this list to hide the fact that it is the Manifesto’s original language’, revealing their ‘dream of a new world literature’, where languages become interchangeable in a transnationally mediated world.¹¹⁴ As they go on to say, ‘[n]ational one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature’.¹¹⁵ We need to reconnect Britain to the revolutionary series, and understand the profound effects of 1848 on the understanding of the social in Britain, just as in the rest of Europe. ‘Thanks to the European revolutions’, said the British Eclectic Review at the beginning of 1851, ‘if they had done no other good for mankind, they were fraught with blessings in leading the respectability of England to behold, in all its ghastliness, a social depression darker and more destructive than the serfage and slavery of the darkest age of modern history.’¹¹⁶

It is important to remember how little the idea of the nation can explain a ‘national literature’.¹¹⁷ A ‘national’ literature can only come into being in the ambivalent and unstable field of the inter-national. Ironically, it was the successes of the international moment of 1848 which established ‘English Literature’ as a ‘national’ subject.¹¹⁸ ‘English Literature’ was delivered by the success of Chartism, the success of the working-men’s colleges, the success of the Queen’s College for women, the success of University College London, where Arthur Hugh Clough, just returned from two revolutions, one in France and one in Italy, became head of University Hall from 1848, and from 1850, Professor of English Language and Literature. In creating an English literary tradition, Clough, Maurice, and their colleagues, who were the early pioneers of university English teaching, were justifying something new and smuggling in some radical ideas about the education of the people. Clough gave lectures on the ‘democratic revolution’ that was under way in the English language.¹¹⁹ The success of all these socialistic and liberal cooperative schemes, born of a transnational revolutionary moment, created ‘English Literature’ in the universities and the schools, with the unintended consequence that a false idea of literature as national was to become more and more firmly entrenched into the twentieth century.

After 1848, literature—along with drains and telegraphs—was to become another civilizing technology of reform. The strength of these 1848 roots has made it difficult for successive generations to decouple literature from nation, and so we have continued to misread and distort texts which depend on matrices of meaning that are far wider than merely national. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton has suffered particularly badly in this respect. Properly to understand the scale of Mary Barton as a ‘national novel’, we need to place it back into the European-urban series of the ragged, and Gaskell herself back into the European context from which she was writing in the 1840s. Quarantining Mary Barton in a container called the ‘English Industrial Novel’ makes it appear a somewhat dull and unconvincing work, but reinsert the novel into the moving series to which it belongs and it springs back to life as a part of an ongoing unfinished conversation which includes Alessandro Manzoni, Fanny Lewald, Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas, Félix Pyat: one episode in a much bigger series that is rolling thunderously across Europe in 1848.¹²⁰

¹ I discussed the ‘nationalization’ of Shakespeare at mid-century in Clare Pettitt, ‘Shakespeare at the Great Exhibition’ in Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole (eds), Victorian Shakespeare, vol. 2: Literature and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 61–83.

² See Clare Pettitt, Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

³ ‘Some forms of multilingualism play a role even in those constellations of literary history that appear to be the most steadfastly monolingual’: Olga Anokhina, Till Dembeck, and Dirk Weissmann, ‘Close the Gap! Literary Multilingualism Studies and the Nineteenth Century/Close the Gap! Pour une ètude de plurilingualisme littéraire européen au XIXe siècle’, in Olga Anokhina, Till Dembeck, and Dirk Weissmann (eds), Mapping Multilingualism in 19th Century European Literatures/Le plurilinguisme dans les littératures européennes du XIXe siècle (Zurich: Lit Verlag GmbH & Co., 2019), pp. 1–14, p. 3.

⁴ Kathleen Tillotson reminds us that in the 1840s, ‘French novels were much read in England at this time by men and independent women—one shop in the Burlington Arcade, Jeff’s (the shop where Miss Evans first met Mr. Lewes) sold nothing else’: Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 7. See also [G. H. Lewes], ‘Recent Novels; French and English’ Fraser’s (December 1847): 686–95.

⁵ Namier, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals, p. 4 (emphasis mine).

⁶ EBB to Mary Russell Mitford ([London] [27 October 1845]), Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. Philip Kelley et al., 27 vols (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1993–), vol. 11, pp. 142–4, p. 143. Hereafter referred to as The Brownings’ Correspondence. EBB had just finished Sue’s Le Juif Errant which she had been reading in its multiple volumes across an entire year. The first part of Balzac’s Les Paysans had been serialized in La Presse in December 1844; however, because of a dispute, and eventual break, with Girardin, the founder of La Presse, the completion of the novel was published posthumously. George Sand’s novel was published in three volumes in 1845. EBB read all of these in French. Renée Balibar discusses the serials of the 1840s that ‘took the peasantry as their subject…[and which] concerned the unrest then breaking out in the countryside’. Balibar notes that the connection to the 1848 revolutions is (in 1977) unnoticed in critical editions of these works. Renée Balibar, ‘An Example of Literary Work in France: George Sand’s “La Mare au Diable” / “The Devil’s Pool” of 1846’, in Francis Barker et al (eds), 1848: The Sociology of Literature, pp. 27–46, p. 39.

⁷ Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero discussed in Marcus Waithe and Claire White (eds), The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830–1910: Authorial Work Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 6. Barthes calls this the ‘Flaubertization’ of writing in the 1850s and 1860s: Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Anette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill & Wang, 2012), p. 72; originally published as Le Degré zero de l’écriture (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1953).

⁸ Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 341–2. Bourdieu adds that he uses the term ‘forty-eighter’ ‘to evoke the analogy with the illusions of 1968 whose collapse still haunts our present day’ (p. 341), revealing, perhaps, something of the historical misidentification at work here. He also says that the defenders of art for art’s sake oppose ‘ “social art” and the “literary bohemia” just as much as they oppose a bourgeois art which is subordinated in matters of art (and also the art of living) to the norms of the bourgeois clientele’: p. 342.

⁹ [Malcolm Bowie], ‘The Modern Period 1789–2000’, in Sarah Kay, Terence Cave, and Malcolm Bowie, A Short History of French Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 193–314, p. 234.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 274.

¹¹ Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (New York: Verso, 2013), p. 26.

¹² Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, pp. 42–3. Jameson is here discussing the conventional story of the emergence of existentialism as a revolt against Hegelianism.

¹³ Raymond Williams noticed that ‘[i]t is identifiable as a new fact of the fiction of the 1840s, and very marked in 1848 itself, that it admits class relations, including class conflict, as the conscious material of fiction’: Raymond Williams, ‘Forms of English Fiction in 1848’, in Barker et al. (eds), 1848: The Sociology of Literature, pp. 277–90, p. 288.

¹⁴ Bernard Weinberg, French Realism: The Critical Reaction 1830–1870 (New York: Modern Language Association of America; London: Oxford University Press, 1937). He adds, ‘many critics regarded realism as having derived rather from a new materialistic spirit in society, following upon the Revolution of 1848, than from any literary tradition’: p. 129. See also Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Both Balzac and Courbet were described as ‘realists’ and this was a derogatory term.

¹⁵ Luc Herman, Concepts of Realism (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996), p. 4. Herman continues: ‘France and the latter share a bustling capital and industrialisation, but this does not hold for the German regions. Furthermore, these general factors, important as they are for the contents of the new programs, can hardly explain the simultaneous emergence of a critical term. The (simple) solution could be found in the pilot role played by Paris, which seems to have functioned as a trendsetter for the other two’: p. 4 (emphasis original).

¹⁶ Pierre Bourdieu gives an account of the autonomization of the literary field in the wake of 1848 in The Rules of Art (1992), but according to Waithe and White this is ‘not easily translated into a British context’: ‘Introduction’, in Waithe and White (eds), The Labour of Literature, p. 7.

¹⁷ Franco Moretti has suggested that ‘[a]s the historical novel spreads throughout Europe and then throughout the world, its plot remains constant (and “British”)—while its characters change (and become “local”)’. Moretti himself admits that this is ‘simplifying somewhat’, but his recentring of the history of the novel in Britain and France—together with his suggestion that the format and plot of the novel remain cookie-cutter ‘British’ while the characters particularize according to their new environment—is unhelpfully reductive. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1999 [1998]), p. 193. For similar critiques of Moretti, see Richard Maxwell, ‘Book review: Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900. Franco Moretti. London: Verso, 1998’, Modern Philology 98:4 (May 2001): 695–9.

¹⁸ Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 4; originally published as La République mondiale des lettres (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999).

¹⁹ ‘For a very long time, at least until the 1960s, the image of Paris was bound up with the memory of the French Revolution and the uprisings of 1830, 1848 and 1870–71’: Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, p. 24. For a collection of engagements with Casanova’s work, see also Christopher Prendergast (ed.), Debating World Literature (London: Verso, 2004).

²⁰ Casanova, The World Republic, pp. 32, 34. One critique of Casanova’s work is from Michael Malouf, who claims that ‘[h]er area of study is defined by a world largely shaped around the development of the novel, with poetry and theater playing ancillary roles. Politics and journalism…are irrelevant to the system of “literariness” that she seeks to chart.’ Michael Malouf, ‘Problems with Paradigms: Irish Comparativism and Casanova’s “World Republic of Letters” ’, New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua 17:1 (Spring/Earrach 2013): 48–66, p. 56.

²¹ Lewald, A Year of Revolutions, p. 51.

²² In the second part of this quotation, Emerson is quoting the Scottish writer Samuel Laing’s remarks on the German language in his 1842 Notes of a Traveller. RWE JMN 13, p. 264.

²³ J. G. Herder’s poem ‘An die Deutschen’ [To the Germans] in Herders sāmmtlichte Werke (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1881), vol. 27, pp. 128–30, p. 129; translated and quoted in Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), p. 52.

²⁴ Claus Møller Jørgensen sticks with the Anglo-French account of literary supremacy, arguing that ‘[p]olitical models were drawn primarily from France and Britain, the most liberal states in a Europe of primarily absolutist dynastic territorial states. In this regard too, the situation was analogous to that of the novel.’ Jørgensen, ‘Transurban interconnectivities’, p. 207. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, p. 174. I disagree.

²⁵ Alessandro Manzoni, ‘Introduzione a Fermo e Lucia’ (1821), in Lanfranco Caretti (ed.), I promessi sposi (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), p. 621; translation my own. Fermo e Lucia was the first version of the story and appeared in 1821.

²⁶ Bruce Penman, ‘Introduction’, The Betrothed (London: Penguin, 1972), pp. 7–14, p. 11.

²⁷ Goethe and Lamartine both enthused about the novel. In the first four years after its first publication in 1827, ‘[i]t ran through nine editions in Italian, one in French, two in German and one in English’: Penman, ‘Introduction’, The Betrothed, p. 11. Manzoni was then converted to the idea that Tuscan represented the true Italian language and so revised the novel, painstakingly rewriting it. In his foreword to the rewrite, Manzoni says ‘[w]e have rejected the language of our author as intolerable; but what have we substituted for it? This is the all-important question.’ The Betrothed, p. 22.

²⁸ Quoted in Luca Serianni (ed.), Il secondo ottocento: dall’ Unità alla prima guerra mondiale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), p. 41. In his post as Commissioner at the Ministry of Education and Senator of the Kingdom of Sardinia, Manzoni had considerable opportunity to put his language reforms into effect. See Barbara Reynolds, The Linguistic Writings of Alessandro Manzoni: A Textual and Chronological Reconstruction (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons Ltd, 1950), pp. 56ff. According to De Mauro, only 2.5 per cent of the population could speak the national tongue fluently in 1861: Tullio De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita (Bari: Laterza, 1970), p. 42.

²⁹ Penman, ‘Introduction’, The Betrothed, p. 12. After 1848, Manzoni became a member of the Piedmont government where his son-in-law, the writer D’Azeglio, was Prime Minister.

³⁰ Raymond Grew, ‘Culture and Society 1796–1896’, in John Anthony Davis (ed.), Italy in the Nineteenth Century: 1796–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 206–34, p. 215.

³¹ Thomas Carlyle, ‘No.1: The Present Time’, in Latter-Day Pamphlets [1853] in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Henry Duff Triall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), vol. 20, pp. 1–47, p. 5. The publication of these anti-democratic opinions caused a permanent split between Carlyle and Mazzini as well as between Carlyle and Mill.

³² Clark, ‘From 1848 to Christian Democracy’, p. 201. Clark continues, ‘[t]he means adopted by the nineteenth-century Catholics—mass-circulation media, voluntary associations, demonstrative forms of mass action, the expansion of schooling among deprived social groups and the increasingly prominent involvement of women in positions of responsibility—were quintessentially modern’: p. 201.

³³ Gramsci’s comments on Manzoni are scattered across the Notebooks and relate to many different themes. Renate Holub suggests that Gramsci makes of Manzoni’s texts a series of ‘ “archaeological” sites, where numerous inquiries are unearthed and intersect’: Renate Holub, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 51. This is indeed Gramsci’s technique throughout the Notebooks, and not only with Manzoni: Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari, 3 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), vol. 3, pp. 196–7.

³⁴ György Lukàcs, The Historical Novel [1937], trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin, 1962), p. 70.

³⁵ Jonathan White makes an argument for Manzoni’s importance as a reformer: Jonathan White, ‘Manzoni’s Persistence’, in Paul Hamilton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 446–70.

³⁶ Alessandro Manzoni, I promessi sposi, in Opere, ed. M. Barbi and F. Ghisalberti, 3 vols (Milan: Casa del Manzoni, 1943–50), vol. 1, p. 580.

³⁷ Raymond Grew says that ‘Manzoni’s carefully restrained writings pushed against conventional limitations of form and genre; and in his network of personal connections, and his multiple interests, he embodied the intellectual programme of the Risorgimento.’ Raymond Grew, ‘Culture and Society, 1796–1896’, p. 215.

³⁸ Alessandro Manzoni, The Bethrothed, trans. Bruce Penman (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 76 (emphasis added). All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page references are given in parentheses in the text.

³⁹ Peter Mack notes that ‘[Gaskell’s] letters show an easy familiarity with Italian, French, Rossini’s The Barber of Seville in Italian, and Chaucer in Middle English, which she clearly expected her correspondents to share’: Peter Mack, ‘Reading and Community as a Support for the New in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton’, in Peter Mack, Reading Old Books: Writing with Traditions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 136–68, p. 138.

⁴⁰ Mary Thwaite, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell and Italy’, Gaskell Society Journal 4 (1990): 57–83, p. 57. Alice Crosta points out that ‘Manca però una documentazione precisa delle sue letture italiane: nella corrispondenza cita più volte Dante, ma non fa mai riferimento a Manzoni’ [We do not have any precise record of Gaskell’s Italian reading: in her correspondence she often mentions Dante but she does not refer to Manzoni]: Alice Crosta, Alessandro Manzoni nei paesi anglosassoni (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), p. 121. An English translation had appeared in 1828 as The Betrothed Lovers, and another after the Tuscan version in 1842 came out in 1845 as The Betrothed. As the first Italian publication in 1827 was of a very limited edition in Italy, it is perhaps more likely that Gaskell would have read the Tuscan Italian version which Manzoni rewrote in Florence and published in 1840–2, to great international acclaim. She may, however, have encountered the first English translation earlier than this. See also Francesco Marroni, ‘The Shadow of Dante: Elizabeth Gaskell and The Divine Comedy’, Gaskell Society Journal 10 (1996): 1–13.

⁴¹ Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis and Other Stories, ed. Heather Glen, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 197. John Lucas mentions Gaskell’s reference to Manzoni in his The Literature of Change: Studies in the Nineteenth Century Provincial Novel [1977] (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 31. I also mention it briefly in Clare Pettitt, ‘“Cousin Holman’s Dresser”: Science, Social Change, and the Pathologized Female in Gaskell’s “Cousin Phillis”’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 52:4 (March 1998): 471–89, p. 479. Gaskell’s great friend Mary Mohl was passionately in love with Claude Fauriel, a close friend and early translator of Manzoni: see Margaret Lesser, ‘Mme. Mohl and Mrs. Gaskell’, Gaskell Society Journal 13 (1999): 36–53; Margaret Lesser, Clarkey, a Portrait in Letters of Mary Clarke Mohl (1793–1883) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 28–36 and the correspondence which follows between Mary Mohl and Claude Fauriel, pp. 39–112, which ceased only when Fauriel died in July 1844.

⁴² Ford Madox Ford continues, ‘[y]ou will always feel subconsciously that, great as Dickens is, and passionate as is his desire to engage your sympathies for those of the underworld, he overdraws. He may tear your heart strings, but Mary Barton will give you knowledge. So it is with Manzoni.’ Ford Madox Ford, The March of Literature: From Confucius to Modern Times (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939), p. 665.

⁴³ For Chapters 12 and 13 of his novel, Manzoni used his experience of a brutal riot in 1814 in Milan called the ‘battle of the umbrellas’ (because it took place on a rainy day). A furious mob burst into the Senate on 20 April 1814, pillaged its halls and searched for the Minister of Finance, Guiseppe Prina, who was finally discovered hiding in disguise. Prina was hated for his unyielding policy of taxation. The crowd tortured and finally killed him, stuffing the corpse’s mouth with stamped paper. Manzoni wrote a first draft of the novel in 1821, finished it in 1823, revised it extensively again and published it in 1827.

⁴⁴ ‘The Great Fear of 1789, which follows the storming of the Bastille, is instigated by distant rumors of a conspiracy by aristocrats who allegedly hired bandits to attack the countryside.’ Oruc, ‘Plebeianization, Un/Bound Seriality’, pp. 288–9.

⁴⁵ Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, ed. Angus Easson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 179.

⁴⁶ [Mazzini], ‘Italian Literature since 1830’, London and Westminster Review 6:28 (October 1837): 132–68, p. 142.

⁴⁷ Marx and Engels, ‘The Manifesto of the Communist Party’, p. 494.

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 495.

⁴⁹ Lewald, A Year of Revolutions, pp. 60, 84.

⁵⁰ RWE to Lidian Emerson (1 December 1847), RWE Letters 3, pp. 442–3. Ellen and Edie are Emerson’s small daughters. Deborah Wynne makes the same point, that raggedness was ‘a source of embarrassment for a nation whose wealth was based on textile manufacture’: Wynne, ‘Reading Victorian Rags’, p. 34.

⁵¹ Charles Dickens, ‘The Author’s Preface to the Third Edition’, in Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. xxv–xxviii, p. xxvii. Historians have tended to agree that there were improvements in the clothing worn by the working class as the Victorian period progressed. Beverly Lemire, for example, argues that ‘raggedness declined among the working poor’: Beverly Lemire, ‘The Secondhand Clothing Trade in Europe and Beyond: Stages of Development and Enterprise in a Changing Material World, c. 1600–1850’, Textile 10:2 (2012): 144–63, p. 158.

⁵² Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, ed. Macdonald Daly (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 60, 11. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page references are given in parentheses in the text.

⁵³ Andrew Dickinson, My First Visit to Europe; or, Sketches of Society, Scenery, and Antiquities in England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland and France (New York: George P. Putnam, 1851), p. 48.

⁵⁴ Elizabeth Gaskell’s husband, William, was the Secretary to the Domestic Mission to the Poor that was run by Cross Street Unitarian Chapel. John Layhe, Domestic Missionary to the Poor, wrote in his Chapel Journal in July 1842 that ‘[t]he demand for soup tickets continues unabated…[one poor man] went for soup one morning as early as half-past one o’clock, and even then found 50 or 60 persons before him’: Report of John Layhe (30 April 1843) to the Annual Meeting of the Manchester Ministry to the Poor, Ninth Report to the Manchester Ministry of the Poor (Manchester: Forrest, 1843), pp. 7–8. Gaskell started the novel to distract herself from her grief over the death from scarlet fever of her baby son Willie in August 1845, aged only ten months.

⁵⁵ Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England [1844], in Karl Marx/Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 4: Marx and Engels: 1844–45, pp. 295–596, p. 361.

⁵⁶ Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen Forties, p. 205. Tillotson adds that the topicality of Mary Barton was ‘[n]ot only because of the European revolutions, but also because of the closing of many Lancashire mills owing to the failure of the American cotton crop, and the Chartist meeting in April. The novel was published on 14 October.’

⁵⁷ Robert L. Selig, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Reference Guide (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1977). There are many other examples. For an excellent historical overview of Gaskell criticism written at a key moment in the feminist retrieval of Gaskell’s work, see Patsy Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 1–20.

⁵⁸ Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties, p. 202. The other novels of the 1840s discussed by Tillotson are Dickens’s Dombey and Son, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

⁵⁹ Carolyn Steedman, ‘What a Rag Rug Means’, Journal of Material Culture 3:3 (1998): 259–81, p. 277.

⁶⁰ Elaine Freedgood has parsed the blue-and-white check curtains in the Bartons’ parlour as metonymically unstable because ‘they contain and display both domesticity and globalization…a domestic and global economy that are in fact already one’: Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 75 (emphasis original).

⁶¹ I am grateful to my PhD student Amanda Ford, who drew my attention to Hoyle’s print, and whose work for her thesis, ‘Material Evidence: The Significance of Fabrics in the Writings of Elizabeth Gaskell’, has helped me think about textiles in Gaskell’s work. See also Carolyn Ferguson, ‘A Weave of Words: Fabric Print and Pattern in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing’, in Janine Hatter and Nickianne Moody (eds), Fashion and Material Culture in Victorian Fiction and Periodicals (Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2019), pp. 67–85.

⁶² Maxine Berg, ‘What Difference Did Women’s Work Make to the Industrial Revolution?’, History Workshop 35 (Spring 1993): 22–44, p. 39. This gender blindness is not, of course, shared by Carolyn Steedman, an important and still under-recognized feminist historian.

⁶³ See ‘The Biopolitics of Seriality’ in Pettitt, Serial Forms, pp. 251–86. Alexis Easley noticed that Gaskell’s Howitt’s experience was important to her writing of Mary Barton, but she does not develop the thought: Alexis Easley, First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–1870 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 84.

⁶⁴ Raymond Williams, ‘Chapter V: The Industrial Novels’, in Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 [1958] (New York: Doubleday, 1960), pp. 94–118. Williams dismisses Mary’s story as a capitulation to ‘the familiar and orthodox plot of the Victorian novel of sentiment’: p. 96. Gregory Vargo has very helpfully drawn our attention to ‘the significant but unrecognized ground shared by Gaskell and the Chartists’, showing how Gaskell’s literary work is grounded ‘in a rich but largely forgotten canon of radical writing’: Gregory Vargo, ‘Questions from Workers Who Read: Education and Self-Formation in Chartist Print Culture and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton’, in An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 115–147, pp. 115, 147. Vargo carefully explores the Gaskells’ connections to the Radical Unitarian circle centred around W. J. Fox’s South Place Chapel in London, including John Humphreys Parry, William Shaen, James Stansfield, and William and Mary Howitt and the non-Unitarians Douglass Jerrold and Eliza Cook, all of whom endorsed the Chartists’ programme and actively participated in radical organizations such as William Lovett’s National Association in London. Elizabeth Gaskell also became very close friends with William Fox’s daughter Eliza (‘Tottie’) after Mary Barton was published.

⁶⁵ Williams, Culture and Society, pp. 94, 95.

⁶⁶ Steinlight, Populating the Novel, p. 102. Gregory Vargo also discusses Williams’s seminal judgement of the novel, which placed it ‘in the modern canon while delineating a set of terms through which it is still commonly discussed’: Vargo, An Underground History, p. 134. Catherine Gallagher agrees with the ‘initial realism giving over to melodrama’ reading, but argues that self-contradictory ideological imperatives drive the split, not artistic failure. Deirdre D’Albertis also focuses on contradictions in Gaskell’s politics, which she says ‘ricochet almost uncontrollably between orthodoxy and radicalism’: quoted in Vargo, An Underground History, p. 135. Josephine Guy says all Victorian fiction revolves around the individual and is always resolved around changes in individual behaviours: quoted in Vargo, An Underground History, p. 135. See also John Lucas, who criticizes Mary Barton’s plot along similar lines in John Lucas, ‘Mrs. Gaskell and Brotherhood,’ in David Howard, John Lucas, and John Goode (eds), Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Critical Essays on Some English and American Novels (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 141–206; and Rosemarie Bodenheimer, who argues that the novel’s domestic and sentimental aspects displace ‘attention from political issues to individual acts’: Rosemarie Bodenheimer, ‘Private Grief and Public Acts in Mary Barton’, Dickens Studies Annual 9 (1981): 195–216, p. 204.

⁶⁷ In The Holy Family (1845), Marx and Engels include a discussion of Eugène Sue’s novel Les Mystères de Paris. Marx quotes Fourier’s progressive views on the treatment of women and criticizes the hero of Les Mystères, Rudolph as he fails to ‘grasp the general condition of women in modern society as an inhuman one’: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Critique, in Karl Marx/Frederick Engels Collected Works 1844–1845 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), pp. 5–211, p. 195. Nevertheless, Joan C. Tronto has suggested that Marx and Engels base their revolutionary programme on ‘traditional gender roles’: Joan C. Tronto, ‘Hunting for Women, Haunted by Gender: The Rhetorical Limits of the Manifesto’, in Carver and Farr (eds), The Cambridge Companion to The Communist Manifesto, pp. 134–51, p. 148. Gaskell could not have known about the Manifesto when she was writing Mary Barton. It was published for the first time in England in 1850 in The Red Republican, translated into English by Helen Macfarlane. The Red Republican was a Chartist journal edited by George Julian Harney.

⁶⁸ Jan-Melissa Schramm, ‘“Standing for” the People: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Professional Representation in 1848’, in Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 106–39, p. 133. Schramm suggests the timing of the novel helped with its depoliticization: ‘[b]y the month of its appearance, October 1848, all the Chartist leaders were imprisoned, and although some local agitation continued, the threat of national disorder had passed’, p. 139.

⁶⁹ Fanny Lewald, The Education of Fanny Lewald: An Autobiography, trans. Hanna Ballin Lewis (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 270 [orig. Fanny Lewald, Meine Lebensgeschichte, vol. 3, p. 232]. The work in question was Fanny Lewald’s Der dritte Stande [The Third Estate] (Berlin: Reimarus, 1845), a novella about the Wallbach family, the wealthy, middle-class owners of a cotton mill. Lewald also wrote a novel, Auf rother Erde (1850). It is set between the summer of 1848 and the spring of 1849, against the background of the revolution. Like Mary Barton, it ends with the emigration of the main characters. Marie and Anton (she a farmworker’s daughter, he a factory owner’s son) emigrate to America where Anton has bought a farm. Both novels suggest that the process of democratization is not yet advanced enough for these couples of the future to thrive. See Deborah Pinfold, Ruth Whittle, and Christina Schönfeld, ‘Representing 1848: Autobiography and Fiction in Fanny Lewald’, Colloquia Germanica 33:3 (2000): 239–54. For Lewald’s rapturous assessment of Mary Barton, see Peter Skrine, ‘Fanny Lewald and Mrs. Gaskell’, Gaskell Society Journal 4 (1990): 52–57, pp. 53–4. On a trip to England in the summer of 1850, Lewald stayed in Manchester with Geraldine Jewsbury; she saw and described Gaskell at a crowded concert, but the two women never actually met. For a serious discussion of Lewald’s relationship with George Eliot—whom she did meet—and an assessment of their writing as ‘realism’, see Julia Kuehn, ‘Realism’s Connections: George Eliot’s and Fanny Lewald’s Poetics’, George Eliot—George Henry Lewes Studies 68:2 (2016): 91–115.

⁷⁰ Lewald, A Year of Revolutions, p. 154. Lewald was cross about the intended censorship but even crosser about the reason that the threat of censorship was withdrawn.

⁷¹ Gareth Stedman Jones reminds us that ‘[t]he period between the 1790s and 1848 was not one of exceptional economic growth except in a few highly localised regions, yet the political conflicts occurred on a national or at least supra-regional scale’: Stedman Jones, ‘Elusive Signifiers’, p. 430.

⁷² ECG to Edward Chapman (21 March [1848]), The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 54; ECG to Edward Chapman (2 April [1848]), Gaskell Letters, p. 55; ECG to Edward Chapman (13 April [1848]), Gaskell Letters, pp. 55–6, p. 56. It is left to us to speculate as to whether Chapman was deliberately deferring publication of a book which he saw could be construed to be seditious. Certainly, by the time Mary Barton finally came out in October, most of the leading Chartists were in prison, and France was preparing for the elections that would make Louis Bonaparte president. Three years later, Louis Bonaparte would suspend Parliament and the Second Empire would last from 1851 to 1870.

⁷³ ECG to Mary Ewart (?late 1848), Gaskell Letters, pp. 67–8, p. 67. ECG to Edward Chapman (1 January [1849]), Gaskell Letters, p. 68.

⁷⁴ Rebecca Greenland, ‘Right to Work’, The New Oxford Companion to Law, ed. Peter Cane and Joanne Conagan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) online: eISBN:9780191727269 [consulted 14.02.20]. The First Article of the Italian Constitution of 1948 is ‘La Repubblica è fondata sul lavoro’ [Work is the foundation of the Republic].

⁷⁵ The storming of the Berlin Armoury in June forced Prussia to offer public relief with the provision of public works: Sean Eddie, ‘The 1848 Revolution in Prussia’, p. 110. The Prussian King compromised and met the workers’ demands. The Constitution of 1850 was long-lived and successful, conceding more to the taxpayers. Eddie judges that ‘there are grounds to regard the 1848 revolution in Prussia a success, though they are certainly not the ones that Marx himself would have celebrated’: p. 125.

⁷⁶ Flora Tristan, The Workers’ Union, ed. Beverly Livingston (Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press, 1983), p. 54.

⁷⁷ Flora Tristan, ‘From Promenades in London’, in Flora Tristan, Utopian Feminist: Her Travel Diaries and Personal Crusade, trans. Doris and Paul Beik (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 62, 63. Flora Tristan, who was French-Peruvian, spent some months in England and published Promenades dans Londres ou l’aristocratie et les proletaires anglaise in 1840.

⁷⁸ Although there is no evidence they knew of each other, and Tristan died of typhoid in 1844, Deborah Epstein Nord discusses Gaskell and Tristan together in a chapter of Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); both women also feature in Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen, Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, vol. 1: 1750–1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983).

⁷⁹ But Marx and Engels scorned ‘economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind’, all of which activity they classified under the heading ‘Conservative, or bourgeois socialism’: Marx and Engels, ‘The Manifesto of the Communist Party’, p. 513.

⁸⁰ Will Wilson asks why John Barton is going to Glasgow: ‘What’s he going to do in Glasgow?—Seek for work?’; but Barton is going as ‘a delegate from his Union, to ask help from the Glasgow folk’. John Kerrigan reminds us that ‘regional forcefields of Britishness were encouraged…by commerce (as in the triangulation of Glasgow, Belfast, and the textile towns of Lancashire)’: John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 410.

⁸¹ Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England, pp. 438–9.

⁸² Maxine Berg has pointed to the lack of available data about the contribution of women and children to the nineteenth-century economy: ‘[w]e need to know the extent to which the sources of productivity gain which made the first Industrial Revolution can be found, in industry at least, in the deployment of a largely female workforce with attributes firstly of high labour intensity with female patterns of labour discipline along with technical dexterity, and only secondly of low wages. If we are ever in a position to pin down these sources of productivity gain, we may well find ourselves contemplating an Industrial Revolution which did achieve significant productivity gains, by employing women’s and children’s labour’: Berg, ‘What Difference Did Women’s Work Make?’, p. 41.

⁸³ See Robert Poole, ‘“A poor Man I know”: Samuel Bamford and the Making of Mary Barton’, Gaskell Journal 22 (2008): 96–115, and Rosalind Slater, ‘The Novelist’s Use of Dialect’, Gaskell Society Journal 8 (1994): 87–97.

⁸⁴ For an interesting chapter on the factory fire in Mary Barton, see Paul Fyfe, ‘Industrial Accidents and Novel Insurances’, in By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 100–31.

⁸⁵ Vargo, An Underground History, p. 137.

⁸⁶ Susan Fraiman also argues that domestic work is always represented as serious, hard work in Gaskell’s Mary Barton; and she also notices that Gaskell tends ‘to decouple nurturing from females’: Susan Fraiman, Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), p. 52.

⁸⁷ Chris R. Vanden Bossche reads Mary Barton’s perspective as middle class: ‘Gaskell portrays the working poor as eliciting sympathy but not as setting forth arguments about the injustice of their situation’: Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832–1867 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), p. 172. Lorri G. Nandrea agrees that ‘the encroachment of bourgeois values on working-class culture is evident throughout the novel’: Lorri G. Nandrea, Misfit Forms: Paths Not Taken by the British Novel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), p. 142. Deirdre d’Albertis has argued that ‘[i]n fashioning her social-problem novels, Gaskell found herself torn between individualistic solutions and systemic analysis,’ often choosing the former over the latter: Deirdre d’Albertis, Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Texts (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 6.

⁸⁸ Margot Finn traces the beginning of the socialist and Labour movement in Britain to 1848: ‘the emergence of socialism in the 1880s was rooted in an intensification and acceptance of radical trends associated since 1848 with the cause of labour’: Margot Finn, After Chartism, p. 307.

⁸⁹ Barbara Leckie, Open Houses: Poverty, The Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), p. 112.

⁹⁰ Benjamin Gastineau, Comment finissent les pauvres: étude sociale (A la propagande démocratique et sociale, rue des bons-enfants, 1, 1848), p. 5 (ellipses not in square brackets are original).

⁹¹ Ibid., p. 31.

⁹² ECG to Anne Green (13 May 1849), Gaskell Letters, pp. 827–9, p. 828.

⁹³ William Shaen was also a member of the ‘Clan’: the Garibaldi Italian Unity Committee in this period.

⁹⁴ Inspired by the Manchester Athenaeum (founded 1835), the Whittington Club (founded 1847) was intended to bring the benefits of gentlemanly clubs to the people. William Howitt was the first Chairman and William Shaen was Chairman of the Management Committee from 1847–1851. The Whittington Club allowed women as full members. See Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movements 1831–1851 (London: Macmillan, 1995) and Christopher Kent, ‘The Whittington Club: A Bohemian Experiment in Middle Class Social Reform’, Victorian Studies 18:1 (September 1974): 31–55. Graham Handley, An Elizabeth Gaskell Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 61. Emily Winkworth wrote to her sister Catherine about ‘the Louis Blanc dinner at the Whittington Club’ with Gaskell, ‘present, Mr. and Mrs. Stansfield, Mrs. Hawkes, Miss Cushman, Eliza Cook, Louis Blanc, Mrs. Gaskell, Will, and I.’ Emily Winkworth to Catherine Winkworth (18 May 1849), [Susanna Winkworth], Letters and Memorials of Catherine Winkworth, Edited by her Sister (Clifton: E. Austin and Son, 1883), vol. 1, p. 187. There had been some furore in February of that year when The Times had published a report of a dinner given for Louis Blanc and Marc Caussidière (another prominent French Republican and member of the Provisional Government) at the Whittington with ‘all the well-known Republicans, Communists and Socialists both of the metropolis and of the provinces’, causing Mr Peter Berlyn, Secretary of the Club, to write to The Times objecting that, ‘the institution does not identify itself with any party.’ The Times (15 February 1849), p. 8.

⁹⁵ William Wells Brown, Three Years in Europe: Or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (London: Charles Gilpin, 1852), pp. 118, 119. He saw Blanc at the club on 9 October 1849.

⁹⁶ Emily Winkworth to Susanna Winkworth (6 May 1849) [Susanna Winkworth], Letters and Memorials, vol. 1, p. 177. The Roman Republic had been proclaimed on 9 February 1849.

⁹⁷ Emily Winkworth reported Elizabeth Gaskell’s meeting with Maurice and Ludlow to her sister. Emily Winkworth to Susanna Winkworth (18 May 1849) [Susanna Winkworth], Letters and Memorials, vol. 1, p. 188.

⁹⁸ ‘On Sunday we went to breakfast at the Howitt’s; [sic] to church to hear Mr. Maurice, who I like very much indeed, and who wrote the preface to the Saint’s tragedy I like so much.’ ECG to Marianne and Margaret Emily Gaskell [17 May 1849], Gaskell Letters, pp. 79–80, p. 79. The Saint’s Tragedy was written by Charles Kingsley and published in 1848. Emily Winkworth to Catherine Winkworth (18 May 1849) [Susanna Winkworth], Letters and Memorials, vol. 1, pp.188, 189. Maurice is commended for including ‘instruction in the best mode of conducting instruction in a ragged school’ as part of his curriculum at King’s College London, and each student is expected ‘to take a class one night in the week at least.’ ‘Correspondence to the Editor’, The Ragged School Union Magazine (September 1849): 176–77, p. 177.

⁹⁹ ‘This year of revolution witnessed an attempt…to establish a paper addressed to the working classes, [Politics for the People] in which the points of the Charter and other exciting political topics should be dealt from a Christian standpoint, by men opposed to the physical force Chartists, but who, nevertheless, were in sympathy with the people.’ Quoted from ‘The Life of Daniel Macmillan’, p. 71 in footnote in [Susanna Winkworth], Letters and Memorials, vol. 1, p. 210. Politics for the People was a weekly magazine started in May 1848 by Maurice, Kingsley, Archdeacon Hare, Thomas Hughes, Conington, Ludlow, and Parker.

¹⁰⁰ [F. D. Maurice], ‘Dialogue between Somebody (a person of respectability), and Nobody (the writer)’, Tract Number One, Tracts on Christian Socialism (London: George Bell, 1850). Maurice had been active in establishing Queen’s College London for women students, and the group also advocated workplace crèches, ‘which have taken deep root in France’, to answer ‘the demand for female labour in the factories’: [Anon.] [J. M. Ludlow], ‘Labour and The Poor’, Fraser’s Magazine (January 1850): 1–18, p. 2. Maurice and Ludlow’s group was so politically and religiously radical that by 1853, Maurice had been sacked ‘from the two chairs which he held at King’s College [London], on a charge of unsoundness of doctrine’: [Anon.], ‘Frederick Denison Maurice’, Fraser’s Magazine (April 1854): 371–87, p. 371. This Fraser’s article is highly supportive of Maurice. See Jeremy Morris, F. D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Gaskell was extremely supportive of Maurice at this time, writing to him and soliciting support for his cause among her friends. She also encouraged ‘the revival of [the newspaper] Politics for the People, of which she had been a regular reader’. Ludlow, Autobiography of a Christian Socialist, p. 150.

¹⁰¹ F. D. Maurice to Charles Kingsley (2 January 1850), Frederick Maurice (Jr) (ed.), The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, Chiefly Told in his Own Letters, 2 vols (London: Macmillan and Co., 1885), vol. 2, p. 32. See Edward Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Jonathan Parry, ‘Christian Socialism, Class Collaboration, and British Public Life after 1848’, in Moggach and Stedman Jones (eds), The 1848 Revolutions, pp. 162–84. Parry acknowledges that ‘[t]he difficulty of writing about Christian socialism is that it was not a coherent movement. It proceeded in fits and starts between 1848 and 1854, in response to new external influences’: p. 164.

¹⁰² See Hugh Collins, ‘Is There a Human Right to Work?’, in Virginia Mantouvalou (ed.), The Right to Work: Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2015), pp. 17–38, p. 17.

¹⁰³ ECG to Eliza Fox (26 November 1849), Gaskell Letters, pp. 89–92, p. 90. ‘I mean to copy you out some lines of my hero, Mr. Kingsley’; and she also writes in early November 1849 that she is eagerly awaiting the visit to Manchester of the hero of Hungarian nationalism, Kossuth: ECG to Eliza Fox, Gaskell Letters, pp. 86–7, p. 86.

¹⁰⁴ The Christian socialists rented a building in London and started a Working Tailors’ Association, with 12 tailors, under the leadership of Walter Cooper, an ex-Chartist. Before long there were 17 such cooperatives in London: Maurice (Jr) (ed.), The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, vol. 2, p. 34. See Jonathan Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 105–6.

¹⁰⁵ Information from Peter R. Allen, ‘F. D. Maurice and J. M. Ludlow: A Reassessment of the Leaders of Christian Socialism’, Victorian Studies 11:4 (June 1968): 461–82.

¹⁰⁶ The proclamation of 29 March 1848 in France was met with great enthusiasm by unemployed women. The shops were ‘arranged in the hierarchical structure of divisions and brigades used for the men’s workshops…[but] a consistent lack of fabric, thread and needles…appeared repeatedly in the municipal correspondence as local officials attempted, some quite sincerely, to meet the demands made by the women in their arrondissements’: Judith DeGroat, ‘Gender, Labour and Revolution in the Ateliers des Femmes: Paris, 1848’, in Boardman and Kinealy (eds), 1848, pp. 146–59, p. 152.

¹⁰⁷ Judith DeGroat notes that ‘[t]he report also recorded the individual occupations of the women in the homework programme; not surprisingly, most were workers in the garment trades, the largest number of them seamstresses. The next largest group was the lingères, or fine linen seamstresses. Workers from other trades were also among the homeworkers of the ateliers des femmes: sole piercers from the shoe trade, cap and vest-makers and laundresses represented the garment trades.’ DeGroat, ‘Gender, Labour and Revolution’, p. 153.

¹⁰⁸ F. D. Maurice, Reasons for Co-operation: A Lecture, Delivered at the Office for Promoting Working Men’s Associations, 76, Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, on Wednesday, December 11th, 1850 (London, 1851), p. 18.

¹⁰⁹ Maurice (Jr) (ed.), The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, vol. 1, p. 278.

¹¹⁰ ECG to Eliza Fox (?early [February 1853]), Gaskell Letters, pp. 222–3, p. 223. ECG is writing about her novel Ruth.

¹¹¹ Paul Readman, Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 199.

¹¹² Gillian Beer defends Gaskell, arguing that in Mary Barton ‘[a]lthough the narrative style is kept distinct from the speech of the characters there is remarkably little sense (as there is in some early George Eliot novels) of pity masking condescension. The people she records are vigorously particular, and powerful because they form a community with its own culture and its own history.’ Gillian Beer, ‘Carlyle and “Mary Barton”: Problems of Utterance’ in Barker et al. (eds.), 1848: The Sociology of Literature, pp. 242–55, p. 254.

¹¹³ Marx and Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, p. 481.

¹¹⁴ Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 51, 52.

¹¹⁵ Marx and Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, p. 488.

¹¹⁶ [Anon.], ‘Tracts on Christian Socialism…London: George Bell’, Eclectic Review (January 1851): 66–84, pp. 66–7. This is a largely unsympathetic review which insists that ‘[s]elf-dependence has been the mainspring of all social improvement’ and that the Associated Labour Movement will ‘destroy […] competition’, pp. 68, 77.

¹¹⁷ John Kerrigan points out that the Act of Union of 1707 ‘encourag[ed] the scholars who invented “Eng. Lit.” both north and south of the border to recognize—what is now even more the case—that the subject can neither be defined, nor anglophone literature be historically understood, along purely national lines’: Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, p. 411. Kerrigan argues ‘Eng. Lit.’ only really became taught as restrictively ‘English’ around the time of the Newbolt Report in 1921: p. 4.

¹¹⁸ Chris Baldick agrees that the setting up of Schools for English at Oxford and Cambridge Universities was definitely propelled by the move for women’s education: Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism. Baldick starts his study in 1848 but he makes no particular connection between this date and the European political situation. Alan Bacon points out that King’s College London initiated the study of English Literature before Matthew Arnold at Oxford in 1848, which is where most histories, including Baldick’s and Lucas’s, start: Alan Bacon, ‘English Literature Becomes a University Subject: King’s College, London as Pioneer’, Victorian Studies 29:4 (Summer 1986): 591–612. One link between London and Oxford and the teaching of English Literature must be Arthur Hugh Clough, a close friend of Matthew Arnold’s and Principal of University College (1849–52).

¹¹⁹ ‘The language has been popularized, but has not yet vindicated itself from being vulgarized. A democratic revolution is effecting itself in it, without that aristocratic reconstruction which [is] fortuitous to every good democratic revolution. Everybody can write & nobody writes well.’ Arthur Hugh Clough, MS Teaching Materials: The Dryden Lectures, Lecture Number One, p. 47. Balliol College Archives, Oxford.

¹²⁰ Raymond Williams, who originally coined the term ‘Industrial Novel’, included in this category Disraeli’s Sybil, Kingsley’s Alton Locke, Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South, and George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical. He later found he had to write The Welsh Industrial Novel too.